Almost any essay you pick up and read in a TIME magazine or a general
interest magazine will include examples of four types of paragraphs:

Introduction

Conclusion

Navigation or
transition

Content

Introduction Paragraphs

Introductions attract a reader's attention, invite the reader to
continue, and suggest what the essay will include and how it will be
addressed. Here are a few examples of first paragraphs. Notice how they
get a reader's attention and how they present a topic for discussion.

Controversial Statement

The average senior citizen looks at a nursing
home as a human
junkyard, as a prison--a kind of purgatory, halfway between society and
the cemetery-or as the first step of an inevitable slide into oblivion.
Negligence on the part of nursing home personnel can, in fact, have dire
consequences:.....

Note of
Contradiction

A bright-eyed woman, whose sparkle was rather
more of
eagerness than of intelligence, approached me at a party one afternoon
and said, "Why do you hate women, Mr. Thurber?" I quickly adjusted
my fixed grin and denied that I hated women; I said I did not hate
women at all. But the question remained with me, and I discovered
when I went to bed that night that I had been subconsciously listing a
number or reasons I do hate women. It might be interesting--at least it
will help pass the time--to set down these reasons, just as they came up
out of my subconscious.

Short, Dramatic
Statement

I had a little puppy for a while in Vietnam.
For a period of three days, I would take this little puppy and squeeze it
until it would yelp. Or twist its little paw.

The Use of
Statistics

The beer industry in the United States
grosses 40 billion dollars a
year. Ninety-nine percent of those profits are made by giant corporations
such as Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors. But today, even though
dollars are tight and industries are struggling to hold their ground,
several microbreweries have gained a foothold in Vermont and they are
fighting for their share of the profits (Shaw, 1990). This paper examines
the options available to the Vermont beer drinker and explains what
distinguishes locally produced beers from their national
competitors.

Figure of Speech,
simile or metaphor

Appearing at times as if an artist has splashed
paint on tree trunks
and across the faces of rocks, lichens present a display as vibrant as
wildflowers. Yet most people know very little about these exotic plants.
Striking in variety as well as in color, lichens are useful to humans and
serve as excellent reminders of both nature's fragility and its
resilience.

Use of Quotation

Tragedy, said Aristotle, is the "imitation of
noble actions," and though it is some twenty-five hundred years since the
dictum was uttered there is only one respect in which we are inclined to
modify it. To us "imitation" seems a rather naive word to apply to that
process by which observation is turned into art, and we week one which
would define or at least imply the nature of that interposition of the
personality of the artist between the object and the beholder which
constitutes his function and by means of which he transmits a modified
version, rather than a mere imitation, of the things which he has
contemplated.

Reference to a
Current Event

It is always heartening to see an art revived,
especially when you have forgotten how much pleasure it affords. The art
of buck passing, for instance. It popped to life in New York a couple of
weeks ago when Bruce Caputo, a candidate for the U.S. Senate, was caught
as having described himself as a Viet Nam-era draftee and Army lieutenant.
Mr. Caputo was neither. Yet when confronted with the fact that he had
falsified his credentials in Who's Who in American Politics, he
rose to the occasion as Michelangelo once rose to the ceiling: "To the
extent that I or somebody on my staff was less than careful, we made a
mistake." Thus in a single sentence he was able to identify the lie as
carelessness and to imply that if anyone at all was responsible (a
question he opens), it was probably an underling. Mr. Caputo is small
potatoes, but his comment is buck passing at a very high level. When you
see a performance like his, you see how intricate the art can
get.

Conclusion Paragraphs

Conclusions alert the reader that a writer's thinking is nearly finished. They may review what
has been said, raise issues for further discussion, prod the reader to further action. More later.

Transition Paragraphs

Transitions move the reader from one portion of the writing to another.
Imagine that a writer is addressing the benefits of keeping a journal. He
may have just finished a paragraph which discusses how the journal is a
great way to keep a record of the events in one's life. In the next
section, he will discuss how the journal can help a person re-live these
events by reading them again and again. A transition paragraph might look
like this:

We've learned how keeping a journal can be an effective
way of recording the events of
one's life. Having a record of these events can serve many purposes, one of the most
important being their ability to help the journal keeper to relive important moments in his
or her life.

Notice how the journal writer mentions the subject of the previous
paragraph and predicts the subject of the coming paragraph as a way of
tying the two paragraphs together. Sometimes the transition paragraph
appears as part of another paragraph; the above information could easily
have been the first two or three lines of a paragraph on using a journal
to relive one's life.

Content Paragraphs

By far the most frequent paragraph is the content paragraph, the one
that provides the "meat" of an essay. Typically, content paragraphs
include these parts:

Topic

The topic is the general subject of the paragraph: cats,
for instance.

Restriction

The restriction is that portion of the paragraph which
identifies
what the writer wants to say about the topic; for instance, the writer may
want to suggest that a cat's intelligence rates somewhere between
that of a gerbil and that of a hamster.

Illustration(s)

The remainder of the paragraph, in fact, most of the paragraph
consists of illustrations of the point that the writer wants to make. In
our example about cat intelligence, the writer might develop the
paragraph using any number of strategies. A story illustrating cat
intelligence would work. Quotations from authorities can often make
the point. Sometimes the writer may choose to refer to studies that
have been done to illustrate the point that cats aren't very smart.

A Well-developed
Content
Paragraph

Recent studies by pet psychologists have confirmed what
many dog owners have long suspected, that generally speaking, a
cat's intelligence rates somewhere between that of a gerbil and a
hamsters. Richard Houndsley, a long-time pet psychologist, has
recently completed long-term studies of cat intelligence which
examined whether cats could be trained to perform prescribed tasks.
Houndsley placed 67 cats, all of whom were award winners in cat
shows, with an equal number of noted dog trainers. Each trainer was
instructed to train his or her cat to perform tricks most dogs seems to
master with ease. Cats, compared to dogs, were routinely more
difficult to train to retrieve objects, walk on a leash, heel, sit and stay,
or roll over. In fact, only one of the 67 cats in the study was able to
master one of these tasks, walking on a leash. None of the others,
despite the fact that each was trained by a qualified dog trainer, was
successful in mastering even one of these tasks. Houndsley
concluded, based on this evidence that cats, like gerbils and
hamsters, were untrainable and thus were on a par intellectually.

A Poorly-Developed
Content
Paragraph

Cats don't have great intelligence. Dogs are much smarter.
Cats are
fun to own. They can be very pleasant company to old people. Cats do a
good job taking care of themselves so they require much less attention
from their owners. Cats can be very playful and enjoyable to watch. Cats
do shed heavily and cat owners have to find ways to get rid of hair left
behind. Masking tape can do a good job of getting hair off clothes and
furniture. Cats will throw up if they are not treated for hair
balls.